Originally Posted by
Glenn the Great
I want to remind everybody about what happened with the judging situation during the 3rd Quest Contest.
For that contest there were 3 or 4 judges, and all of them dropped out for one reason or another several months after judging had started.
The Silent Assassin (aka TSA), wanting to salvage the contest, disqualified his own personal entry and then took it upon himself to be the sole judge of the quests himself.
The administration decided to roll with it because without a judge there would be no contest. TSA picked a winner, AlphaDawg, fairly quickly.
There were accusations of favoritism (AlphaDawg was TSA's best friend on the forums), accusations that TSA didn't play all the quests (TSA somehow managed to beat 7 or 8 quests in a matter of maybe a couple weeks).
Then you had the whole back-and-forth with the people accusing the accusers of sour grapes... what do you expect when you only have 1 judge? The whole point of multiple judges is to avoid that sort of controversy.
The point I'm trying to make is that judging these things is an enormous effort, and you want to make sure you have people who understand what they are getting into and will commit to the job, and yes, judging will probably be a several month-long affair.